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Presumably the PBS Frontline documentary League of Denial, like the book on which it is based, is so called because League of Lies, Fraud and Moral Depravity was apt to get the authors and producers sued.

But you don’t need to go deeper than the first 30 minutes of the two-hour documentary, which was broadcast Tuesday night, to understand why ESPN pulled its name off the project at the 11th hour, even though the self-proclaimed Worldwide Leader in Sports employs the authors of the book, Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru.

ESPN has the rights to Monday Night Football. Monday Night Football is the No. 1-rated show on cable television. ESPN has paid the National Football League $15.2 billion for the TV rights to it through 2021.

Do you really need a GPS to connect those dots?

ESPN and the NFL are, in short, committed bedfellows in a multi-billion-dollar enterprise. Business partners don’t do dirt on one another, with that much dough at stake. ESPN can’t appear to be endorsing a show that pointedly kneecaps its No. 1 sports property, in case a few million homes decide not to watch any more.

The book exposes, and the documentary graphically drives home — for all the world to see — a pattern of misdirection, negligence and aggressive intimidation on the part of the NFL as it first attempts to discredit, and later to trivialize, those who would link repeated head blows to diseased brains in retired players.

The thing is, the world doesn’t want to see. Not really.

It would interfere with the enjoyment of the spectacle. Better to look away.

Oh, the few million who watched will be duly appalled at the NFL’s malfeasance, at the glib lip-service NFL commissioners Paul Tagliabue and his successor, Roger Goodell, have paid to the dead and dying, while never quite acknowledging the sport’s culpability.

And some of the viewers might never watch an NFL game the same way again. But that’s not like saying they won’t watch.

Most sports fans would just rather not know, thanks.

Because if they knew that their favourite player might end like Mike Webster, the documentary’s opening tragedy, the beloved centre on the Pittsburgh Steelers’ dynasty teams — unable to remember where the grocery store was, or that putting on a coat could save him from being cold, or Krazy-glueing his teeth to his gums after they had fallen out — if they knew that their hero might go broke, addled and finally dead at 50 suffering from the degenerative brain disease CTE, they might be momentarily alarmed.

But only until a new favourite player came along.

They might raise a beer to old Mike now and then in Pittsburgh watering holes, but they were probably quite all right with watching latter-day Steelers linebacker James Harrison unapologetically knock snot-bubbles (and brain cells) out of unsuspecting ball carriers and quarterbacks during his career there.

Viewers and fans, it seems — and, yes, sportswriters and broadcasters — have an infinite capacity for not thinking about what they don’t want to think about.

I once covered plenty of boxing, the little clubs and Olympics and minor pro bouts, but it was not long after the iconic figure of my early days as a sportswriter, Muhammad Ali, started exhibiting the classic punch-drunk symptoms of dementia that I lost my taste for watching people punch one another in the head ... and the sad story of Canadian boxer Shawn O’Sullivan has only deepened my feelings.

I still have an abiding love of the Canadian Football League, even though I would need to be living in a dream world to think that many of those bulging physiques weren’t artificially obtained, even though I have seen the addled endings and ramblings of players crippled by the game, and the post-concussion trauma of Matt Dunigan, and even though I fear for the futures of Dave Dickenson and Buck Pierce and Mike Reilly.

Who could ever watch a staged hockey fight again — let alone stand and cheer — if we really thought very hard about why enforcers like Derek Boogaard and Rick Rypien and Wade Belak and Bob Probert die young? But we do.

Who could ever watch the Tour de France again, knowing the fallout from the fraud Lance Armstrong perpetrated on the world is the well-founded suspicion that the champion you watch today is almost certain to be exposed as a cheater tomorrow?

Sport to sport to sport, we happily wear the blinders.

But how do you cheer for the NFL to win its fight for survival against the players whose lives the game has destroyed? Because that’s what it is about — survival — as the neuropathologist who first identified CTE in Mike Webster’s brain found out.

After having his findings savaged by the NFL’s attack dogs, Dr. Bennet Omalu said in the film, he had a second case come to him, another former Steelers player, Terry Long, who committed suicide by drinking antifreeze. Again, he found CTE in the brain. Again, he published a paper in a medical journal.

This time, he met with an NFL team doctor, who repeatedly asked him if he knew what he dealing with? Dr. Omalu finally said, no, what?

“If 10 per cent of mothers in this country would begin to perceive football as a dangerous sport,” the NFL doctor said, “that is the end of football.”

Dr. Omalu eventually left Pittsburgh.

“I wish I never met Mike Webster,” he said, in the documentary. “You can’t go against the NFL; they’ll squash you.”

The NFL settled a class-action suit with former players for $765 million this year — not only a pittance, considering the number of plaintiffs, but a sum roughly equivalent to 40 per cent of what it takes in, in a single year, from ESPN alone. And moreover, the settlement included a clause that excuses league officials from ever being required to reveal what they knew about brain injuries, and when they knew it.

Nice footwork, NFL. Those generations of players who thought they were only signing up for ruined knees and arthritis and hip replacements, and did so gladly, might have had second thoughts if they knew what you knew.

But hey, consciences are for suckers.

Maybe it’s true the league can’t be held responsible for what it once didn’t know about the after-effects of the sport on players’ brains. But surely it is responsible for what happened after it had access to the studies, after it began suppressing the science, denying it, appointing a rheumatologist (!) from the New York Jets’ medical staff to head its ass-covering Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee and trump up a hocus-pocus “scientific paper” flatly refuting any connection — zero — between concussions and lasting brain injury.

That NFL-sponsored paper further stated players couldn’t be harmed by putting them back in the same game after suffering a concussion, and that it was probably okay for younger players, school kids and college players, to do the same.

League of Denial covers the NFL end nicely. Society of Denial is a whole other book.

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